A stock that rose after a creator recommended it did not necessarily beat anything. This article explains benchmarking, why the S&P 500 comparison matters, and how it changes the scoreboard.
Here is a quiz. A YouTuber recommends a stock, and over the next eleven months it rises 8%. Was it a good call?
Most viewers would say yes. The correct answer is: you cannot possibly know yet, because the question is missing its second half. What did everything else do over those same eleven months? If a plain S&P 500 index fund returned 12% over the identical window, then the recommendation cost its followers 4 percentage points relative to the simplest possible alternative. The stock went up, and the call still lost.
This is the single most important idea in evaluating investment advice, and it is almost entirely absent from investing content.
The opportunity cost nobody mentions
Every dollar you put into a recommended stock is a dollar that could have gone into a broad index fund with no research, no stock-picking risk and near-zero effort. That index fund is your opportunity cost – the return you gave up. An investment recommendation is only valuable if it beats that alternative; otherwise the recommendation, however sophisticated its reasoning, produced negative value.
Creators rarely frame their results this way, and the omission is flattering to them for a simple reason: markets usually go up. Across the many multi-month windows between late 2025 and September 2026, the S&P 500 was up double digits over a large share of them. In an environment like that, a dartboard beats cash and most tickers rise. Raw price change credits the tide to the swimmer.
Same dates or it doesn’t count
Benchmarking has one non-negotiable rule: the comparison must run over the identical dates as the call. Not the calendar year, not “the last twelve months,” but from the day of the statement to the day of measurement.
This matters more than it seems, because market returns are lumpy. A creator who made a call in late October 2025 was working against a stretch where the index subsequently gained around 12-16% by September 2026; a call made in July 2026 competed against an index that had moved only 1-2% since. The same +10% stock result is a clear loss in the first case and a solid win in the second. Any scoring that ignores start dates will systematically flatter calls made just before flat markets and punish calls made before rallies, regardless of skill.
This is also why lining up different creators’ percentage results side by side is not a ranking. Timelines with different starting points measure different periods of market weather. Honest trackers say so explicitly: the numbers are records of individual calls against their own contemporaneous benchmark, not a league table of returns.
A tale of two winners
Consider two real-shaped examples from tracked creator timelines. In one, a creator’s semiconductor pick gained roughly 156% over a seven-month stretch in which the index gained about 10%. That is a genuine, enormous beat – about 146 points of excess return. No benchmark quibbling diminishes it.
In another, a different creator’s big-tech valuation call showed the stock up 5.7% over ten and a half months in which the S&P 500 rose 11.8%. The page shows a green number and an arrow pointing up, and the position still underperformed the do-nothing alternative by six points. Both calls “went up.” Only one beat the market. Without the benchmark printed next to the return, a viewer cannot tell these two stories apart – and they are opposite stories.
Why creators avoid the comparison
Some of the avoidance is innocent: benchmarking is extra work, and audiences respond to simple numbers. But the deeper reason is that the comparison is brutal. Decades of data on professional fund managers show that the majority fail to beat their benchmark over long periods, and these are full-time professionals with research teams. There is no reason to expect content creators, as a population, to clear a bar that most professionals miss. An honest benchmark next to every call would reveal that a large share of celebrated picks were, in market-relative terms, losses. That is not a message the format is built to deliver about itself.
How to apply this in practice
The mechanics are simple enough to do by hand. Record the date of the call and the stock price that day. Record the S&P 500 (or another appropriate index) on the same date. At any later point, compute both percentage changes over the identical window and subtract. The difference – excess return – is the only number that measures whether the call added value.
Doing this retroactively across a creator’s history is more tedious, which is where independent records earn their keep. A new independent project, They Said Buy, prints exactly this comparison on every tracked timeline: the stock’s change since the creator’s first dated forecast, and the S&P 500’s change over the same start and end dates, side by side. The design choice sounds small. It is not. It converts every green number into a question – green compared to what? – and answers it on the same line.
Beyond the simple benchmark
Purists will note that the S&P 500 is not always the right yardstick. A small-cap pick might fairly be measured against a small-cap index; a Chinese e-commerce stock against its own market. Risk-adjusted measures go further still, asking whether the excess return was worth the extra volatility. These refinements are real, but they are second-order. The first-order correction – any same-dates broad benchmark at all – captures most of the truth, and it is the step almost everyone skips. Do not let the perfect benchmark become an excuse for using none.
The scoreboard, corrected
Once you internalise benchmarking, investing content sounds different. “This stock is up 40% since I recommended it” becomes an incomplete sentence, and you find yourself automatically asking for the missing clause. Some creators survive the correction impressively: their picks beat the index by wide margins, repeatedly, and the benchmark makes their skill legible instead of hiding it in a rising tide. Others do not survive it, and their highlight reels dissolve into market returns plus noise.
Either way, you learn something true. A rising stock is weather. Beating the market, on the same dates, over and over – that is climate, and climate is the only thing worth following anyone for.
